3 weeks ago
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AI video platform D-ID announced today that it is releasing two new types of avatars — Express and Premium+ — for content creation.
Companies are chasing the golden goose of creating AI avatars that are more humanlike and can potentially offload video creation for enterprise use cases in areas like marketing, sales, and customer support. With different generative models, it is easier to give little text input and little visual data to create videos for business purposes that don’t look entirely out of place. D-ID’s new models are an effort to make it more competitive in this landscape.
Express avatars can be trained with roughly one minute of video and replicate users’ head movements during speech. Premium+ is the company’s marquee model, which might need at least a few minutes of recording for training, but can reproduce an AI avatar for videos with hands and torso. The company’s idea is that with hands and torso movements, the avatar feels more human-like in interaction with other users.
The company said that the Premium+ models are capable of real-time interaction that might be good for use cases like webinar and translation.
The company plans to engage these avatars for enterprise use cases such as creating sales leads, customer engagement, and personalized marketing campaigns.
“We believe the best way to interact with AI models is face-to-face; that is why we are creating these new hyper-realistic avatars and a natural user interface,” D-ID CEO Gil Perry told TechCrunch over a call.
“We also think businesspeople would create a digital avatar of themselves. We want those avatars to be safe and built in a secure way so this tech is not used to mislead anyone.”
D-ID said that personalized video campaigns are more effective, causing click-through rates to increase by 30% and conversion rates increase by 35%.
Along with the new avatar, the company is launching its enterprise marketing suite as well with tools such as interactive avatars and AI influencers for brands, video campaign generation, translation support in 30 langauges, integration with platforms like Canva and PowerPoint, and an API-led integration with CRMs and marketing automation tools.
Last year, D-ID launched an app that lets users create videos from a single photograph. While the company’s new avatars are limited to its desktop studio tools for now, it plans to expand this tech to the mobile app.
Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. You can reach out to him at im[at]ivanmehta[dot]com
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